Mystery, Alaska (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com Member: Online Film Critics Society
"The Rangers taking their off-time to go to some cold village and play pond hockey with eskimos: it's a joke!"
Starring Russell Crowe, Burt Reynolds, Colm Meaney, Hank Azaria, Mary McKormick, Lolita Davidovich, Maury Chaykin. Rated R.
After watching Mystery, Alaska, I decided to do a little research. I ventured over to the Internet Movie Database, the premier source of movie information on the net, to test a theory. I searched for movies and tv series about hockey, baseball, football, and basketball. When I searched for baseball, it returned 145 movies and tv shows. Football gave me 145 and basketball came up with 68. But when I did a search on hockey, the result was a measly 44 references. Why is hockey so underrepresented in pop culture? Hard to say, but while audiences seem to be tired of sports movies of late, a hockey film or two is not unwelcome, provided it doesn't have the words "Mighty Ducks" in the title.
Mystery, Alaska is a hockey town. Life revolves around the "Saturday Game", a weekly pond hockey match-up. It's not a competition. They don't keep score. The teams are decided at random. The game is more than a tradition: it's a legend, a way of life. A veteran of the "Saturday Game", John Biebe, who has played for some thirteen years is about to be honorably discharged. He's a good player, but he is getting old and his agility on skates isn't what it used to be. He has to be liquidated to make room for an ambitious up-and-comer, a lighting- fast high-schooler with relationship issues.
Just then, a cocky former Mystery resident who has abandoned the town for a career in Hollywood returns -- on a helicopter, no less. But he doesn't come empty-handed. He brings word that the New York Rangers are going to fly to Alaska for a game of pond hockey with the "Mystery Boys". It seems some genius at the National Hockey League had an idea for some good, cheap promotion: why not fly the league's premier hockey team to the middle of nowhere and have them play a sort of charity game with mysterious "Eskimos"?
But not so fast. It seems the Rangers aren't too keen about taking their precious free time to play pond hockey in Alaska. The players' union files a grievance demanding that the arrangement be cancelled, and Mystery sends their lawyer (Maury Chaykin) to represent the town and hopefully maintain what dignity they have left. As if that wasn't enough, crises arise in the homeland as well. The team needs a coach. The town Mayor (Colm Meaney) wants John to do it as a sort of retribution, but John wants to play, thereby pressing the old hockey expert/town judge (Burt Reynolds) to take the job.
Mystery, Alaska is not only full of cliches, it clings to them as if they were lifeblood. I don't take notes when I watch movies, but I wish I had brought a notepad and a pen for this one just so I could write down at least a significant portion of the countless examples of idea recycling that goes on in this movie. To name a few: kids spontaneously cursing for laughs, a guy who piles an inordinate amount of [fill in food here; in this case, mashed potatoes] onto his plate when he is distracted during dinner, a guy watching sports during sex and screaming out when a goal is scored, and of course, the obligatory "Big Game" ending, which we know can turn out one of two ways. I'll leave it to you to guess which one is used here.
I've always thought of director Jay Roach as some kind of weird genius. He is the man behind the legend that is Austin Powers and its sequel. Both are delightful, no-holds-barred comedic masterpieces, always reveling in their own outrageousness. With Mystery, Alaska, Roach tries to get accustomed to the limitations of a more conventional narrative and he doesn't always succeed. I'm not saying that he is incapable of making good "standard" movies, far from it, I'm sure that if given the right project he could very well extend his range. But here, working from a script by tv vet David E. Kelley, he wants to burst out. As a matter of fact, he finds some outlets to do just that, one of them being -- whe else? -- Mike Myers, having oodles of fun with an exaggerated Canadian dialect as a smarmy hockey commentator. There are times when you sense the Jay Roach from Austin Powers coming out of the woodwork, and those tend to be the high points. But for much of the movie he has to restrain himself, and with a script as average as this one it feels forced.
Nevertheless the film stays afloat. There is something about its pure, well-intentioned affection for hockey that won me over. If, to a sports movie, the game it's portraying is nothing more than a part of a formula, it will not work, which is why none of the three Mighty Ducks movies ever went anywhere. But when we feel a love for the sport, the oldest of formulas can seem almost as good as new.
Grade: B-
©1999 Eugene Novikov
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